CMOS Checksum Error - Reset - XP Pro won't boot

[dasharp]

My PC that has been happily running Win XP Pro for quite some time came up with a CMOS Checksum error yesterday. I pressed F2 to continue and reset CMOS automatically. Now XP Pro won't boot. Machine completes POST fine, finds the boot sector on the hard drive, then nothing. Went in an manually reset CMOS settings, same thing. I replaced the hard drive with one that has Win2000 and it boots just fine.

What does XP look for that Win2000 doesn't?

Even tried another hard drive with XP Pro, same thing. Installed XP Pro into new folder on existing HD, same thing.

Any Ideas??

 

[TGS]

Your boot device set as Hard Drive 1, or whatever onboard PATA SATA raid device you may be using?

If the CMOS settings got reset and that's the only thing that has happened. If the drive was the problem the second drive should have booted up. Seeing as how they both won't boot, it most likely is your first boot device is set to CD or floppy by default. Double check that your HDD 0 is the primary boot device.

 

[dasharp]

I only have one hard drive installed. I was switching them out to try to different OSs. I can see the messages on screen as it checks the CDRom, then the HD, finds the boot partition and starts the boot, but nothing more happens, the screen doesn't clear, no more activity of any sort.

 

[TGS]

When you boot on the 2K drive, can you also have the XP drive hooked up? Run a disk scan against the XP disk to see if you have any physical issues on the XP drive.

If everything looks good, you may want to try a repair against the XP drive, and run a fixmbr against it.

 

[dasharp]

I bit the bullet and reformatted one of my spare drives, after clearing the CMOS and manually resetting it (it complained about an Invalid CMOS Display Type). A clean, fresh install of XP Pro has my system back up and seemingly working fine.

The Invalid CMOS Display type concerns me a litlle, but the video card is OEM, so I don't think it should be an issue, and it appears to be working fine.

Thanks for your help.